[T]his volume is the new and best gateway for students, non-Africanist historians, and specialists alike into the scholarly history of this subfield, its emergent (and enduring) debates, and state-of-the-art case studies that stimulate new theorizing. INT'L JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES [These essays] add much information about the African economies from the seventeenth to the nineteenth ... Read morecenturies, as well as provide new insights into the Atlantic Economy in these years. This is an important collection of first-rate essays. EH.NET '[Looks]... at one of the most perplexing questions in world history: as so many of the crops which were cultivated in the Americas by African slave labour were grown or could be grown in Africa, why were the costs and the horrors of the Middle Passage undertaken? ... It is a problematic that demands a serious discussion of what we know about African political economies in the last half of the last millennium AND a real command of the intentions and understandings of the merchants trading into Africa ...This will prove, at least I hope it will prove, to be a much-discussed book. It is a fine collection and it is a major collection.' - Professor Richard Rathbone, Emeritus Professor and Professorial Research Associate, SOAS 'Though many books deal with the so-called transition in West Africa from slave trading to legitimate trade, none has such a valuable, direct focus on the role of commercial agriculture in the process. One learns an enormous amount about slavery, slave-trading, the Atlantic slave trade, and the movement to abolish slave trading and slavery from reading this book. This book is of critical importance to each of these topics or sub-fields.' - Professor Donald Wright, Distinguished Teaching Professor of History, State University of New York Show Less